Erica L. Green – författare

A kaleidoscopic account of five days in the life of a city on the edge, told through seven characters on the frontlines of the uprising that overtook Baltimore and riveted the world, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Other Wes Moore.When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an "illegal knife" in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated "roughly" as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from.      In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation''s attention.     Wes Moore is one of Baltimore''s most famous sons--a Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author, decorated combat veteran, White House fellow, and current President of the Robin Hood Foundation. While attending Gray''s funeral, he saw every strata of the city come together: grieving mothers; members of the city''s wealthy elite; activists; and the long-suffering citizens of Baltimore--all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers.     Knowing that when they left the church, these factions would spread out to their own corners, but that the answers they were all looking for could only be found in the city as a whole, Moore--along with Pulitzer-winning coauthor Erica Green--tells the story of the Baltimore uprising. Through both his own observations, and through the eyes of other Baltimoreans: Partee, a conflicted black captain of the Baltimore Police Department; Jenny, a young white public defender who''s drawn into the violent center of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young black woman who''d spent a lonely year protesting the killing of her own brother by police; and John DeAngelo, scion of the city''s most powerful family and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who has to make choices of conscience he''d never before confronted.     Each shifting point of view contributes to an engrossing, cacophonous account of one of the most consequential moments in our recent history--but also an essential cri de coeur about the deeper causes of the violence and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath.

A riveting investigation into a school, a scam, and a notorious college admissions scandal that exposes the inequalities and racial segregation of American education, from two award-winning New York Times journalistsT.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, boasted a 100 percent college acceptance rate, placing students at nearly every Ivy League university in the country. The spectacle of Landry students opening their acceptance letters to Harvard and Yale was broadcast on television and even celebrated by Michelle Obama. It became a national ritual to watch the miraculous success of these youngsters-miraculous because Breaux Bridge is one of the poorest counties in the country, ranked close to the bottom for test scores and high school graduation rates. T.M. Landry was said to be "e;minting prodigies,"e; and the prodigies were often black.How did the school do it? It didn't: It was a scam, pulled off with fake transcripts and personal essays telling fake stories of triumph over adversity. Worse, Landry's success concealed a nightmare of alleged abuse and coercion. In a yearslong investigation, Katie Benner and Erica L. Green explored the lives of the students, the school, the town, and Ivy League admissions to understand why black teens were pressured to trade in racial stereotypes of hardship for opportunity.Gripping and illuminating, Miracle Children argues that the lesson of T.M. Landry is not that the school gamed the system but that it played by the rules-that its deceptions and abuses were the outcome of segregated schools, inequitable education, and the belief that elite colleges are the nation's last path to life-changing economic opportunity.